The Census data bring good news on income, poverty, and health coverage. The typical household’s income rose more from 2014 to 2016 than in any other two-year period on record (with data back to the 1960s), poverty declined, and the share of Americans without health insurance fell to a record low. This marks the first time on record, with data back to 1988, that all three measures of well-being improved for two years in a row. . . .

Economic progress lowered poverty and lifted median household income to its highest level in at least nine years, Census data released September 12 show, while the continuing effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) pushed the uninsured rate down to a record low. . . .

The share of Americans without health insurance fell to an historic low in 2016, the Census Bureau’s new Current Population Survey data show. In 2016, the third full year that the ACA major coverage expansions were implemented, the large coverage gains that the ACA has generated continued to grow. Some 8.8 percent of people lacked insurance in 2016, down from its 2015 rate of 9.1 percent and down more than one-third from the 2013 rate of 13.3 percent. . . .

States that have adopted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion had a much lower uninsured rate in 2016 than states that haven’t, and the gap continues to widen, new Census data show.

Some 6.5 percent of the people in the 31 states (including the District of Columbia) that expanded Medicaid by January 2016 lacked health insurance that year, compared with 11.7 percent in the 20 non-expansion states, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. . . .

As the House prepares to vote on a budget plan to cut safety net programs — including tax credits for low- and moderate-income working families and food assistance, and almost inevitable cuts in housing assistance — the Census Bureau on September 12 released new figures showing that these programs kept millions of people out of poverty in 2016. . . .